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Apollo to the Moon

The story of human exploration of the Moon by the United States.

When President Kennedy committed the nation in 1961 to landing a man on the Moon, America had sent only a single astronaut briefly into space. By the time the Apollo program ended, it had taken the efforts of more than a half-million people, produced the largest and most powerful rockets ever built, and sent humans farther than they had ever gone before.

The great achievements of the Apollo program rested upon many small ones, upon thousands of technical innovations and boundless ingenuity. The heart of Apollo to the Moon is its unparalleled display of artifacts from Apollo and earlier missions that bring this sweeping endeavor down to a human scale. Displays range from a huge F-1 rocket engine and a scale model of the Saturn V rocket to space food and personal items that astronauts took into space. The gallery also displays some of the Museum's great treasures: spacesuits worn by Apollo astronauts on the Moon.